


like a thunderbolt

by Kells



Series: gifts, requests, and other little bits [4]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Animals, Alternate Universe - Real World, F/M, Female Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:04:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2219994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kells/pseuds/Kells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Will you relax? Give the kid a minute with her.”</p><p>“Why, so he can claw her eyes out?”</p><p>“He just wants to say ‘hi’. Trust me, we'd all know if he were looking for a fight.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a thunderbolt

**Author's Note:**

> Questions? Comments? Blame OneGoodEye. She fills my head with nonsense and then I spend all day reading about the courtship rituals of bald eagles instead of, you know, paying attention at meetings. I'm sorry/you're welcome/thank you, I had fun.
> 
> there's no cake but there's a lot of fish.
> 
> might be Howard/Peggy too, in a 101 Dalmatians kind of way, but I won't insist on it.

“Carter! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Is that _a tranquilizer gun_?”

“Your bloody menace is harassing my Stephanie.”

Peggy Carter took her duty to all the birds under her care very seriously, but the juvenile bald eagle she had named and raised was especially dear to her. Stephanie had been rescued as an orphaned eaglet and only recently released back into the wild. Things weren’t going very well- at a little over two years old, the young eagle still showed little inclination to hunt for herself. So far she had managed to subsist on carrion, but Peggy and her colleagues knew too well that Stephanie would never last the winter if she didn’t learn to feed herself.

“Will you relax? Give the kid a minute with her.”

“Why, so he can claw her eyes out?”

“He just wants to say ‘hi’. Trust me, we'd all know if he were looking for a fight.”

Peggy knew that was true: Bucky, the male eagle on the approach, was already much closer to Stephanie than most of their species tended to prefer, but his posture was deferential and his attitude more curious than aggressive. Howard adjusted his binoculars and whistled through his teeth. “Smooth operator, too. He's got a present for her.”

Peggy frowned, skeptical, but as they stood there Bucky dropped a moderately sized river trout in front of the other juvenile’s tree. Stephanie eyed him cautiously, then braved the brief journey to the ground. Slowly, she edged towards the newcomer’s offering. When she looked up nervously, Bucky took another shuffling step away. He was still watching closely when she dug her claws into the fish, but as soon as she had just taken her first bite he stretched his wings and took himself elsewhere.

“See?”

Howard’s grin was as smug as Peggy’s was stunned. “Bucky’s a classy gent, Carter.”

She snorted.

“What kind of name is Bucky for an eagle? Or for anyone, come to that.”

It was short for Buchanan, Howard explained.

“As in Archie Buchanan? He was a pilot in the First World War. What kind of name is Stephanie for an eagle?”

“I think it’s pretty,” Peggy muttered, too distracted to manage her responses. For the first time in days, her too-fragile ex-patient had more food than she could consume at once.

Howard had assumed that would be the end of it, but Bucky was back the next day with another fish in his claws. By day four, Stephanie was leaving her tree as soon as she saw him approaching. They danced around each other at first, but Bucky stayed longer every time. Eventually, Stephanie was so used to her frequent caller that she had no problem with him standing by her while she ate. Howard and Peggy exchanged incredulous looks when Stephanie defied all kinds of behavioural norms by pushing one of her visitor's prizes back towards him, obviously willing to share. Even Bucky looked unsure, but all that happened when he lowered his head to take a tentative bite was that Stephanie piped at him cheerfully and went back to her side of the fish with gusto.

Howard blinked, feeling out of his depths.

“You know you’re way too young to be this into her, right?”

Peggy muttered something insulting about men who spoke more kindly to birds than other people, but Howard decided he could take a lesson in chivalry even if it was being taught by a bald eagle.

“At least he’s got taste- she's a lovely bird.”

He wasn’t sure Carter would reply.

"Your aviator's not too shabby either."

* * *

Things continued in much the same vein until the day Bucky appeared with something furry squirming in his talons.

“What the hell, ace? Kid doesn’t even like mice.”

Peggy’s voice was wondering.

“I think he wants to teach her to hunt.”

Howard made a conscious effort not to be derisive.

“Don’t get your hopes up, okay? He’s a bald eagle, not a dolphin- they’re not really wired like that.”

But it was Peggy who had the measure of things that time. Bucky landed with his usual grace, caught the waiting Stephanie’s eye, and released his victim. The female watched him, plainly confused. Bucky snagged the mouse before it could escape, stared his companion down, and then released his prey again. This time, Stephanie made a clumsy grab for it, just a shade too slow. Bucky snatched up their snack with much more patience than Howard would have shown. Stephanie caught the pathetic creature on their third attempt, but didn’t seem to know what to do once she had it. After some hesitation, she offered it back, watching closely when Bucky killed it with a single strike of his beak. He moved a few feet away, as was his custom, so she’d know he wasn't going to fight her for a kill that wasn't big enough to split between them. When Howard looked away, Peggy was smiling warmly.

“Your Bucky is well ahead of the learning curve.”

“Please. Do you think I’d waste my time on anything less than the best?”

The little masterclass in topping the food chain progressed well, Stephanie quickly learning to go after their small prey as soon as it came towards her. In no time at all she was catching Bucky’s partially stunned teaching samples on her second try, then her first. On the fifth day she finished off an unfortunate baby rabbit for herself, jabbing at it with her beak just like Bucky had done for her in the days leading up to her first kill. Peggy, saying nothing, threw her arms around Howard and smiled as she cried.

* * *

As Stephanie gained strength, she began to fly greater distances. Bucky seemed happy enough to slow down to her speed and stay close to the tree-line whenever they were together. Soon, Stephanie started venturing out to meet her playmate instead of waiting for him to appear, and eventually they were fishing together too. Peggy had been worried that Bucky would come to see Stephanie as a threat as the female got stronger- and bigger- but he never showed fear or resentment. Before long they were soaring together, chasing, diving and mock-fighting like a mated pair. They still ate together more often than not, and remained the only birds Howard had ever seen share their kills without squabbling.

“These kids are completely nuts,” he complained, watching Stephanie present a small salmon to Bucky with what looked a lot like avian pride. "I’d write a paper on the childhood betrothal of bald eagles but I don’t want all the ornithologists in North America thundering up here to gawk at them.”

Plenty of juveniles began constructing twig nests long before they were mature enough to find real mates- playing house, researchers called it among themselves- but Howard and Peggy agreed that there was an unusual degree of gravitas to the way Steph and Bucky went about it. When they actually settled down in their junior eyrie, which was not at all normal behavior, Howard just sighed.

“They can’t be thinking about- no! What am I saying? They literally can’t do that, Howard, they’re still sub-adult. Look at me talking like they’re going to run away together if their parents don’t approve. Peggy, the eagles are making me crazy.”

She squeezed his shoulder sympathetically.

“I don’t think it’s fair to blame that on the eagles.”

The lovebirds even travelled together on their long southward journey. By the time they returned for the year, resplendent in their mature coats, it wasn’t even surprising that they headed unerringly for the nest they obviously thought of as theirs to share indefinitely.

“It’s incredible. Are you sure you don’t want to write your paper?”

“No way,” Howard grinned. “We're not letting any nosy-parkers cramp his style _this_ year.”

Now that they had reached maturity, he meant, this was the season in which Bucky would have to make his play for real. The kid seemed to know it, too- they noticed him bringing Stephanie presents, fish and furry things as well as fragrant conifer twigs for their nest, at even more than his usual frequency. He had also started showing off more when they were flying- not quite the aggressive aerial displays of brand-new suitors, but certainly more dips and flips than he’d performed in previous years. Stephanie, for her part, demonstrated her maturity by very firmly fighting off two larger females who tried to challenge her for their territory.

* * *

“Wait one damn second. Who's this asshole?”

Howard had three main objections to the newcomer, namely that the male eagle they'd never seen before was larger, older, and stronger than poor Bucky. “Where’s that dart gun you used to wave around?”

“Howard!”

“What? This guy’s big enough to take his goddamn wings off.”

He was an ugly old thing too, skulking and sinister with a face like a death's head.

“Howard. He has to win her on his own.”

He shook his head, wounded on his bird’s behalf.

“He won her years ago.”

The eagles went in hard, a flurry of heavy wings culminating in an ugly clash of knife-sharp claws. Bucky was quick, it was true, but the interloper was bigger and more experienced.

“Come on, kid. You can do this.”

Stephanie seemed to think so too. She gave a fearsome shriek which encouraged her champion as much as it startled the challenger. Bucky twisted in his attacker’s grip, fighting back with renewed ferocity until he had the upper…wing. He chased the older eagle off with one last triumphant peal, then let the currents waft him back towards the nest so he could drop heavily next to Stephanie.

Howard felt his heart rate begin to slow as the female nuzzled close, possessive and protective. Peggy, of course, expressed her affection in anxiety.

“Can you see where he’s been injured? That-“

“Asshole,” Howard supplied brightly. “You can say it, Carter.”

She glared.

“That _bastard_ really got stuck into him.”

Howard beamed, feeling lightheaded.

“Tomato, to-mah-to. His face got the worst of it, poor kid- eyes and beak are fine, though. He’ll be okay.”

Bucky was, in fact, more than okay. It turned out that Stephanie was at least as protective as her almost-mate, and for several days Peggy watched Howard struggle not to pass out from his helpless giggling at the sight of the female eagle all but pinning her companion to the nest so he would stay put and let her tend to him.

A few weeks later, Howard was drowsing in the afternoon sun when Peggy hauled him most of the way out of the grass in excitement.

“Howard! Howard, look!”

“I’m looking,” he assured her, blinking rapidly. “What am I looking- oh. Yeah, okay, now that’s cartwheeling.”

It wasn’t just a courting ritual- it was _the_ courting ritual. They were in freefall, talons securely entwined as they careened wildly towards the earth below. They cut it so close that Howard was a millisecond away from shutting his eyes like a big wuss when they broke apart. Stephanie released her mate-to-be with just enough time for Bucky to right himself before he would have slammed into the ground. Peggy gasped in relief, still clutching Howard’s arm as the eagles shot back skywards to do the same, again, but better.

Howard couldn’t find it in himself to care that his eyes were wet.

“Good for you, ace.”

* * *

The eyrie that would be their adult home was much like their juvenile effort in shape, but roomier, more solid, and a lot higher off the ground. There were no eggs that year, which made Peggy sigh, but Howard grinned and pointed out that Steph and Bucky were only just adults- there was still time, and lots of it.

Or so he thought, until an unexpected late blizzard devastated the area just as the eagles were beginning to arrive back for the year. Grateful like they’d never been before for the tags the birds wore, Howard and Peggy settled in with the majority of their colleagues to keep one eye on their respective raptors while they waited for the storm to wane.

The second time Peggy Carter yanked Howard bodily out of sleep, it wasn’t with good news. She was already crying, and he knew from her face what she was going to say.

“We’ve lost her. There’s just nothing.”

He followed her out into the lab without stopping to get dressed. Some of their coworkers were still awake; most looked away discreetly, trying to give them some privacy as soon as they realised what must have happened. Someone asked hesitantly if it could be the storm affecting their equipment. Peggy looked hopeful until Howard found the still-flickering light that was their Bucky, frozen in place instead of moving on against the storm. He reached for the keys to his truck, but Peggy’s hand closed over them before he got there.

“Don’t you dare.”

“We’ll lose them both. He’s not going to leave his girl.”

“If you go out and get yourself killed we’ll lose them both _and you.”_

She pushed him backwards so violently that he tumbled into rather than sat down on the chair she’d wanted him to fill. “You know I love him too.”

He nodded, slowly, and watched her put his keys away.

It felt like they spent all of the next two days watching Bucky’s heart rate slow as the snow beat down and the temperature kept dropping. As soon as the roads were declared passable Howard leapt to his feet, ready to fight Peggy if he had to. Instead, he found her waiting for him with her field jacket on and her choice of their medical supplies already in hand.

They had Bucky's coordinates, but even though they headed right there it felt like they were days too late. The eagles were a mess of wings and blood and snow, Stephanie sprawled at impossible angles with her protector draped over her like a tragic, exotic quilt.

“She hit the cables,” Peggy whispered. Full-grown, their wingspan was just wide enough to be a serious liability when they got too close to electrical wiring. Howard flinched- it was a nasty way to go.

“And of course you stayed with her, you poor sap.”

He reached out gingerly to smoothe Bucky’s icy feathers back- and nearly lost his footing when Stephanie lifted her head to snap at him feebly.

Howard stared at Peggy, begging her to confirm that he wasn’t imagining things. From her spreading smile, he thought things might be looking up. The shock had fried Steph's tag, obviously, but it hadn’t been enough to take their brave girl out of the fight for good. It helped, of course, that her fearless defender had given everything he had to keep her still and warm against both injury and cruel wind.

With Bucky still motionless and Stephanie's wing broken in at least two places, they were well within the confines of the centre's permits to move the birds. Stephanie didn't know that, though, and began to panic as soon as Peggy slipped the travelling hood over her eyes. She keened unhappily, beating her undamaged wing miserably. Her claws remained clenched, absolutely unyielding, over her mate's. 

“Hey,” Howard found himself crooning, wrapping his arms around her to pin her down before she hurt herself. “Don’t freak out, honey. He's still right here.”

There was nothing for it but to move them together.

“Still won’t give an inch,” Peggy murmured admiringly once the pair were safely in the truck. If Stephanie hadn’t been hooded there was no way they’d ever have been allowed close enough to wrap the half-frozen male in warm towels and insulated blankets.

“Smart girl," Howard nodded. "If I ever find a woman as keen on me as this guy is on you I'm going to hold onto her just like that."

Stephanie said nothing, but Peggy smiled as she stroked the kid's head.

“He is something, isn't he?”

“I told you years ago, Carter: our Bucky’s got class.”

Considering the nightmare that had been the storm itself, the birds were nowhere near as badly off as Peggy and Howard had feared. The centre's on-site vet announced with visible relief that the breaks to Stephanie’s wing were the worst of her injuries: there had been relatively little electrical damage, and even the fractures themselves were clean and likely to heal easily. Her mate had arrived “practically deep frozen, honestly,” but all he really needed to recover was time, warmth and sympathy.

Howard found himself grinning again.

“So what you’re saying is we just need to make sure they have food and shelter and then leave them to hang onto each other?”

The doctor nodded, intrigued by his tone. Peggy laughed.

“That’s been our strategy for close to three years now.”

Howard declared that if all Steph and Bucky needed was each other, at least for the moment, then his job was done and he could go back to bed for the first time in three days, all right? No one said it wasn’t, so he went.

* * *

About two weeks later, he was watching Bucky groom his mate, carefully combing through her feathers with his beak as though she were a chick instead of a mature female significantly larger than he was.

“You two are still completely nuts,” he told them in case they had been wondering. “I _should_ just write that damn paper. We could make a whole documentary about you and people would convince themselves that it was all CGI. I’ve seen sock puppets behave more like real eagles than you.”

Stephanie, done ripping apart the salmon Peggy had set out for them, nudged a good portion of it towards her mate and stood over him, close to menacing, until he ate it.

“We should move you to New York or something- I think the cold is messing with your minds.”

“Says the man who regularly talks to bald eagles.”

Peggy came to stand with him, watching Stephanie pick her way through her own share. From time to time, she peered over her own shoulder to make sure her mate was still resting quietly to one side.

“I talk to lots of raptors,” Howard reminded her with dignity. It wasn't the others’ fault that these two were the craziest by far, and therefore the best.

Bucky, chattering softly, offered Stephanie a length of bright white twine as she finished her meal. She inspected it, click-clucked her approval, and laid it carefully with the twigs and other bits and pieces they were collecting for the nest they couldn’t return to yet.

“They really are very odd,” Peggy admitted. Neither Howard nor the eagles seemed offended.

* * *

Peggy had expected to feel the same twinge she had the first time she’d released her Stephanie, but both birds were so eager to be out and about that it was hardly a decision, and certainly not a difficult one. They were off as soon as she and Howard let them go, a clutch of admiring tourists clapping excitedly as the grand creatures took to the sky. Peggy smiled at the look of childlike wonder on Howard’s face when Bucky executed a playful spinning dive that had his mate chuffing reprovingly as she gave chase. Their pealing echoed in their wake.

“If they have a chick this year, I want to name her Natasha.”

The smile slipped right off Howard's face.

“What? No. When they have a chick we’re going to name him Clint.”

“That’s a bloody stupid name for an eagle. Not worse than Bucky, mind, but awful in its own special way.”

“At least it doesn't make him sound like a Russian stripper.”

“Natasha is a perfectly respectable name. ‘Clint!’ That’s the noise a spoon makes when you drop it.”

“I think you mean ‘clink’, Carter, which is at least a real word. I wasn’t aware it only applied to spoons.”

“Shut up and watch the eagles, Stark.”

That _was_ the whole reason they were there.

“Maybe they can name their own chicks,” Howard mused. “How do you feel about ‘Skree’?”

She did him the courtesy of thinking about it.

“I could live with that.”

Overhead, unconcerned with nomenclature, Bucky chased his mate into the clouds, calling his answer when Stephanie screamed. Their talons locked, as they had before and would again, and they dropped, together, into free fall.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Alfred Tennyson, the poem is The Eagle and it goes, in its entirety:  
> He clasps the crag with crooked hands;  
> Close to the sun in lonely lands,  
> Ringed with the azure world, he stands. 
> 
> The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;  
> He watches from his mountain walls,  
> And like a thunderbolt he falls.


End file.
